Usually when I'm interested in a crime, I want there to be layers. I'm interested in stories which tell us something about Australia and what it is like to be living in this country in twenty twenty five.
Like so many of us, Chloe Hooper spent twenty twenty five obsessing over the triple murder trial of Aaron Patterson.
It was different to the crimes that she's.
Written about before in her books The Arsonist and the Tall Man, which was about a death in custody.
For Chloe, it.
Was the domestic nature of the Mushroom killings, the family dynamic that drew her in.
Love skirts very close to hate sometimes, and hate can skirt close to love, And I think in our domestic settings, people have these really complex relationships, and so I think there was a sort of you know, even it's pretty warped, but people attached to this story like a folks story because we could all relate to it in some way. Actually, I think it told us something about Australia's fascination with true crime, and people were tuning into this story for all sorts of complex reasons.
So why did this story captivate the country and what does it say? About us, particularly about women that were drawn to true crime. That was one of the questions that drove Chloe and her friends and colleagues, the writers Helen Ganner and Sarah Krasnastein, as they began traveling to the town of Morewell to watch Aaron Patterson's trial. What followed is the Mushroom Tapes. Conversations on a triple Murder, a book that wrestles with ideas about power.
Money, marriage and murder.
I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM today Chloe Hooper on what our collective fascination with Aaron Patterson tells us about who we are as a country in twenty twenty five. It's Wednesday, December thirty one. Chloe, this case became a national obsession this year, But if you look back to when the story first broke in twenty twenty three, we got these brief details of what had happened, and these initial glimpses of Aaron Patterson herself. I just can't fathom what has happened.
That Ian and he have lost her lives, and Gail has lost her life, and Donna is still in hospital, and I pray, I pray that he pulls through.
What do you think it was that, I think right from the very beginning before it sort of turned into I guess what it is now? What do you think was interesting about it at that point?
Well, I think everybody I know has some family complexity, has a relative or in law, or knows somebody who has had a bitter separation. And I think that something about this story spoke to all of our sense of family dynamics and how complicated they can be. And I think in a way, Aaron Patterson is a sort of operatic figure. The sort of scale of what she did was just so extreme, and I think people kind of tapped into that.
As the book describes, there was this whole cottage industry of journalists, of podcasters, of authors, documentary filmmakers, TV producers, you know, TV fiction in the work as well. So everyone's there in this tiny town in more Well for the duration of this trial. So I mean, first of all, well, just I mean, what was that lacking part of that?
Well, it started off slowly. We got to the trial. It was day five, so it was you know, we hadn't really decided to go until the trial had already started. And at first you could find a seat in the courtroom relatively easily, and then slowly, as you probably saw photographs in the newspapers are online, there were crowds descending on the court house.
This is more Well, a small, unassuming town two hours outside of Melbourne. Until recently, its main tourist attractions were a rose garden and an art gallery. But that was before it became the host of an Australian murder trials gripped the nation and captured international attention.
People were getting up at four am and driving to get a seat and lining up outside.
Well. Almost every major news outlet in the country has set up basically this is Channel seven, Here is the ABC, it's Channel ten and Channel nine, this.
Is the Lunelab. And then there was sort of seemed to be more and more news outlets and media events and people doing crosses about this story all over the world.
It's a case straight out of a true crime TV.
Psychostaticquit yours a whole Australian mushroom poisoning fatalities made headlines far beyond the sleepy Aussie tone in which they happened.
You know, every conversation you had with friends or family seemed to revolve around this. It did become a national obsession.
And so this book, this is a very kind of different book to what you've put out in the past.
It's a collaborative work.
How did it change your process and the way that you thought about the case? To be spending all of this time I'm picking it in these conversations with two other brilliant writers, Sarah Cratenstein and Helen Ghana, I.
Think that we got further working together than we would have worked by ourselves. And it was an amazing experience because usually we would all go into court proceedings on our own, and you know, we'd have your notebook, and
it's very sort of solitary in a way, exercise. But I think that there was something actually accelerated by not putting your shoulder to your work and hiding it and doing it on your own, actually engaging in these conversations, and I think there were sort of moments where we would spark off each other and lift each other up further in our thinking. And I suppose I see this book as actually just as much about women talking about power and about good and evil and ethics of crime
writing and writing in general. And I suppose to have those conversations with Helen and with Sarah was a special moment in all of our lives. And we're all at different stages in our careers. But you know, when you'd go to a trial, you're also sitting alongside really great misery, and so there is always the reality behind the headlines of the damage that is wrought in true crime, in communities and a family.
Coming up.
What the trial revealed about Aaron Patterson and about us if we go back to the trial itself, so as it progressed, more and more of Aaron's life was revealed. So you know, you looked inside her kitchen, you heard her children talking. Her estranged husband also gave evidence. So before anyone heard from Aaron herself, there was already this picture of her forming, I suppose. So how did you start to think about her who she was?
At that point?
I had a sense that she was a fairly dark character from her actions. It just struck me as incredibly calculated to go and search for deathcat mushrooms and then spend months working out how to make this meal and inviting your husband's family over. She invited them over two weeks before the lunch. It was also after she had
served the lunch. It's a horrible way to kill somebody because it's very slow and painful, And there were opportunities where she might have told medicos earlier that she'd foraged for mushrooms, and they may have been able to administer a prophylactic which could potentially have changed the outcomes for her victims.
And So, how did the way that you saw Erin compare to the others?
Sometimes I thought that they had sort of access to deeper wells of humanity. They've had more sympathy for Erin than I did. But I guess that one of the interesting things about collaborating with other people is that even when you disagree, it's almost as if you're all taking different sides, which actually, in the writing of a book an author might do anyway. So maybe they could afford
to be softer because I was being more hardline. And I think that there actually was a way in which our different perspectives balanced out, and the disagreements we were having kind of replicated what could happen in a writer's head. And I think that in a way, this book kind of shows the seams of what can happen in the making of a book, and.
It wasn't clear for a lot of the trial whether or not Aaron Patterson would give evidence, but she did end.
Up doing that.
So when that happened, what were you kind of looking for?
I suppose I think that when you're watching somebody on the stand, you're thinking, well, you know, wondering what the jury will make of their presentation. I was particularly interested in the stories in which that erin was telling the jury, but also the stories in which she felt that she was telling herself. Some of these tales were blatantly untrue.
So Aaron Patterson is a person who lies very easily, and when she got onto the stand there were a number of discrepancies which she had to try to explain her way out of. Sometimes she did that very artfully, other times it was a less convincing performance. She was also on the stand for over a week, which is it's a lot for somebody under pressure to maintain their
different fictions, I suppose, in a really stressful environment. At the end of it, there was the feeling, though that she had done very well, and it was unclear whether or not she would be found guilty, or at least there seemed a strong possibility that there would be a hung jury.
Did you find your opinion of her changing at all during that week?
I suppose the personality that thinks that they can get away with a crime like this is also one that thinks that they can kind of talk their way out of it. So I didn't believe going into the trial that Erin was innocent. We knew before driving to Morewell that there had been charges just recently dropped against her for attempting to murder her husband, and that he had been in a coma as well, with part of his
small intestine removed after eating some of Aaron's food. So it seemed clear to me that she probably was guilty, But I didn't know that she was going to I didn't know whether or not she would actually be found guilty, So my opinion of her did not change a great deal.
And how do you feel now, both about your own interest in this case and all of our fascinations with it.
Well, I think that in some ways Erin seemed to me a kind of fixed force in this saga, And I think that our reactions and I'm you know, my reaction, Sarah's reaction, Helen's reaction, and Australia and the world's reaction is sort of more interesting. In a way, we know that true crime is a genre, that the production of it is largely being driven by a female audience, and that's across all of the media. So why broadly are we fascinated by true crime and why in particular this crime.
I think that it's an escape. I think that these are stories about power. I think women are often tend to empathize not just with the victim of the crime, and unfortunately most often the victims are women, but also with the murderer. I think that in this case, most people are waking up in a state of deep anxiety in Australia in twenty twenty five, but it regarding wars around climate change, AI cost of living, and it's a
horrible thing. But in a way, I think we were all looking at this trial so as not to think about these issues that confront our day to day life in ways we don't know how to fix or understand. With true crime, there's often the sense of an ending, the sense that Erin is now in jail, that order is restored, and we don't need to look so deeply at our own disorder.
Well Chloie, thank you so much for speaking with me, and congratulations again.
I loved the book. I really enjoyed reading it. Ruby, thanks so much.
Tomorrow, on the show, I'm bringing you an interview with China expert Linda Javin. After years of spectacular growth, China has been struggling. People in the country are now stuck in a loop of burnout and austerity, with high youth unemployment and low birth rates. The country has been trying to turn us around, focusing on things like tech AI
and electric vehicles. We look at how China's new economic experiment went in twenty twenty five and what this year holds for one of the world's great superpowers.
I'm Ruby Jones. Thanks for listening.